A colour image retrieval scheme based on Z-scanning technique

Abstract

This paper proposes a new colour image retrieval scheme using Z-scanning technique for content-based image retrieval (CBIR). In recent years, the CBIR is a popular research topic for image retrieval. This paper proposes a scheme which employs the Z-scanning technique to extract directional intensity features for measuring the similarity between query and database images. In the multiple channel images, each colour channel can be processed individually or combined into a grey channel Y. In order to extract the features by Z-scanning technique from all images, each channel of all images must be divided into several N×N blocks. In each block, F pairs of pixels are scanned by a ‘Z’ direction to obtain the texture features. Each colour channel can be obtained an M×M Z-scanning co-occurrence matrix (ZSCM) for storing the probability of each relationship of all closest blocks. At the similarity measure stage, the ZSCMs of query image and database images are compared to measure their similarity. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is beneficial for image retrieval when the images include the same texture or object. On the other hand, the proposed scheme also can get better retrieval results and more efficiency than colour correlogram (CC) technique for colour texture images. Another technique uses motif co-occurrence matrix (MCM) as the feature in similarity measurement. The experimental results show the proposed ZSCM can get better retrieval results and higher recall and precision values than the CC and MCM techniques for public image databases.